The Boys Of Sabr: Baseball`s More Than A Game Of Inches

Lloyd Johnson thinks there`s something missing in the dictionary, right there between ``saber`` and ``saber-toothed,`` and he`s trying to doing something about it.

Johnson, a former researcher for the baseball Hall of Fame, hopes to convince Webster and Co. to include the word ``sabermetrics`` in a future edition.

But he realizes the dictionary business is a lot like baseball: It`s just as tough for a player to go from Class A ball straight to the majors as it is for a word to go from nonexistence straight into Webster`s Collegiate.

``You have to get it into some off-beat dictionary first,`` Johnson said of his unusual goal. ``It`s like going off-Broadway. It can take anywhere from 5 to 10 years to get it in Webster`s.``

Johnson, 36, is executive director of the Society of American Baseball Research (SABR). The word sabermetrics was coined by Bill James, author of the popular ``Baseball Abstract.`` He defines it as ``the mathematical and statistical analysis of baseball records.``

If shelf space in bookstores devoted to sports is any indication, it`s a science that`s growing exponentially in this age of the home computer.

Besides James` ``Abstract,`` other recently released compendiums crammed full of minutiae include ``The 1987 Elias Baseball Analyst`` and ``The Great American Baseball Stat Book.``

The three books are similar in approach and content. Each features gobs of individual player and team ratings, using traditional statistical devices such as RBIs and ERAs and new unofficial stats such as RABs (number of at-bats it takes to score a run) and TIBs (runs batted in, minus home runs).

Sections often are devoted to short articles in which the numbers are explained in easy-to-follow fashion. An example is Tom Henry`s analysis of the decline of the Cubs` starting pitching staff from 1984 (which he calls the

``Big Four``) to `85 (the ``Not-So-Big Four``) in ``The Great American Baseball Stat Book.``

One tool Henry uses is the Pythagorean theorem. It states that the relationship between the number of runs a team scores and the number it allows can be used to predict wins and losses. It translates into a ``simple``

runs squared equals projected winning percentage. The answer should be close to the team`s actual winning percentage. The projected winning percentage can be multiplied times 162 games to come up with a projected won-lost record.

According to Henry`s research, 24 of the 26 major-league teams came within four games of the record projected by the Pythagorean theorem in 1986. Although most baseball researchers appear to be quite sane, their intense devotion to statistics that don`t normally appear in a box score, such as batting average with runners in scoring positions and two outs, can sometimes border on the obsessive. John Dewan, a 32-year-old North Sider, recently quit his job as an actuary to become a full-time free-lance baseball researcher.

Dewan is the director of Project Scoresheet, a not-for-profit organization of about 500 people. Its members, in every major-league city, are assigned to watch games and fill out specially designed scoresheets that are sent to Dewan`s home and fed into his computer by him and his wife, Susan. Project Scoresheet began in 1984. The first three years of statistics it has compiled make up the bulk of ``The Great American Stat Book,`` which Dewan and James co-wrote.

Project Scoresheet is concerned only with statistics, unlike SABR, a 16-year-old organization with some 6,500 members and one salaried employee

--Johnson. SABR is involved in such laudable projects as raising funds to place a stone on the unmarked grave in Frankfort, N.Y., of Bud Fowler, who in 1878 became the earliest known black pro ballplayer.

Dewan said the main purpose of Project Scoresheet is ``to bring some of this information out into the forefront. A lot of it was info that was in the secret files of the Elias Sports Bureau, and we wanted it to come out. They`re the official statisticians of major-league baseball, and whenever we`d call them for information, they`d claim they weren`t available.``

Steve Hirdt, executive vice president of Elias Sports Bureau and co-author of the ``Elias Baseball Analyst,`` replied that their staff of 20 employees is ``just not set up`` to answer every question called in to its offices.

Hirdt, a former researcher for the Baseball Encyclopedia, maintains that much of the increasing interest in baseball stats can be traced to USA Today, the national five-day-a-week newspaper.

``We became aware of the tremendous reception that sports stats received through that newspaper, and it had a trickle-down effect in daily papers as well,`` Hirdt said. ``There`s a lot more charts, graphics and boxes these days, sort of in the style that USA Today produces. Also, more and more people are losing their fear of computers and computer-generated information.``